Long Day

Day 3
Turlock to Madera
65 miles

We woke up this morning at the lovely Travelodge in Turlock. Loaded up the SAG vehicles and headed to the spot where we left off yesterday.

Sean at the starting line with his St. Patrick's Day bling.

Started out heading South right next to the railroad tracks. As a train passed, I gave it the "blow your horn" signal and he nearly blew us off our bikes, it kinda freaked me out. So we rode next to the tracks for about 30 miles today and there was not much shoulder but the motorists were mostly courteous.

We traveled in three groups for the most part today. Group 1: Sean, Travis, Mike, Luke, Tess Group 2: Me, Mike B., Uncle Steve, Collin, Jina, Libby, Neal Group 3: Andy, Linda, Spinner, Angela

Group 2 and 3 traveled together for the first 25 miles until lunch. We passed this sweet Aviation museum. Check out Collin and Jina looking tough in front of the SR71.


At lunch we were standing around laughing at something and all of a sudden we heard what sounded like a fire cracker. Uncle Steve jumped as something hit him in the back of the leg. It turned out that a hole had blown in his tire and we are guessing that it was because of the warm afternoon sun. We had plenty of spare tubes and luckily he had one spare tire because that one was a gonner. So we all stood around and watched as Uncle Steve gave us a free lesson about replacing a tire. We all agreed that he was lucky that it didn't happen on the road.


After lunch we still had 40 miles ahead of us through some rough orchard lined roads and at one point we got a little confused at the corner of Road 24 and Avenue 24.


The first group came in at about 4pm, the second 5pm and the third group came in with daylight to spare at 6pm. Long day on the road and everyone was still smiling, we really are having a lot of fun. We took care of our sore muscles in the pool and the hot tub. The pool was ice cold so we waded up to our knees for a nice ice bath.

Then we relaxed the soreness away in the hot tub...what a life.

Nice jersey tans!

In general, everyone feels a lot better than they did yesterday, much of the knee pain is going away and we are figuring out how to avoid it in the future...onward to a cure!